barrington interview

Gwern Branwen · 02 Oct 2014, 19:20 · from 2014-October.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern at gwern.net (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2014 15:20:21 -0400
Subject: (urth) barrington interview
In-Reply-To: <CAF1072wRZABRWeGZAq8p6XLgzXv-YAux-0bo5H2Yv=hJ9utmEw at mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAF1072wRZABRWeGZAq8p6XLgzXv-YAux-0bo5H2Yv=hJ9utmEw at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CAMwO0gwi1m0UPurwcdYE9zetB5Nc8rr=_S_RkhEqht5dJY_kBw at mail.gmail.com>

An interesting bit about the politics of _The Land Across_:

> Q: ?The Land Across? is your newest novel. What did this book allow you to explore that previous ones had not?
>
> Wolfe: What I did in that book particularly was to take a tyrannical, political setup and show it from the inside: The reason that the people who were involved considered a dictatorship necessary. We seem to think of that sort of thing as an unmitigated evil. But democracy depends upon individuals being willing to contribute and take part in the democratic process.
>
> In other words, they have to look at the people who are running for office and in some cases running for office themselves and make reasoned judgments on the thing and then write letters and protest and so on. And if they are not willing to do that, if they resign from the whole process of government, then you can?t really get anywhere with a democracy. The democracy naturally lapses into some sort of a tyrannical setup.

-- 
gwern
http://www.gwern.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net